Letter from my Father

by Dasia Black

  One great day, Simon uttered his first word, li as he pointed to the ceiling light. Richard and I were in raptures and celebrated each time he said this magic word. Then, the ten-year-old from the building next door, who along with his friends had adopted Simon as their special little person, and who spent endless hours amusing him, climbed a tree outside our window. Tree, said Simon clearly. More delight.

  Richard loved to toss his baby son up into the air and down as Simon chortled and laughed, encouraging more tossing and laughing.

  When Simon was two-and-a-half, his brother Jonathan was born. He was a long skinny baby, energetic and joyful. Though badly squashed during his passage through the birth canal, with red pressure spots on his face and in his eyes, he soon grew into a strikingly handsome baby and then boy, with fair hair, widely-spaced green-grey eyes, small regular features, broad cheekbones and fair skin that tanned easily. He wore an alert yet sensitive expression. I called him Sunshine.

  Simon, called The Prince by Richard’s father, Opapa, was initially jealous and resentful of the new arrival. Unfortunately, I was not able to breast-feed Jonathan. Instead I held him close to me on a pillow, while giving him milk from a bottle. Big brother Simon sat close too, feeding his teddy bear, Theodore, who remained his friend and confidant, accompanying him to kindergarten and even moving to his home when he married.

  Throughout this period, through pregnancies and child rearing, through grieving for my father, I persevered with my University studies and eventually finished my Bachelor of Arts degree as well as a teaching diploma. On afternoons when I had a four o’clock lecture at Sydney University, I fed my baby between two-thirty and three, handing him to the kindly Scottish babysitter, Mrs McKay, then driving to the lecture and arriving home afterwards around six, when the baby was again handed back to me to be fed. Would a more relaxed schedule have been better for both of us? I didn’t ask. Richard encouraged and supported me, fitting everything into a tight schedule.

  Simon showed his independent nature very early. He was happy amusing himself, and by the age of four was showing skills as a builder and a logical, mechanical bent. One morning we were in the lane beside our flat on the way to busy Bondi Junction to shop. On the advice of the Child Centre nurse, I had put a harness with a long lead over his head and shoulders. Once it was secured and we were ready to set off, my son sat himself down on the ground and absolutely refused to move. Nothing I could say would convince him. He would not budge, and nor would he allow himself to be picked up. I recognised a powerful No. So much for the power of parents! I took the harness off. Straight away he got up and, holding my hand, ran along beside me.

  As a dentist’s wife and a conscientious mother, I was determined that my children would be brought up on a diet low in refined sugar, with no lollies or other ‘rubbish’. Yet by the time he was two, Simon’s baby teeth were full of cavities. We were advised that it would be best to have the dental treatment under general anaesthetic. When our little toddler was brought home, he remained asleep for thirty hours – a terrifyingly long time. I sat by his bed stroking his chubby cheeks and his well-shaped head with its fair curls, checking every few minutes that he was breathing, and waiting anxiously for him to wake. Eventually he did. It was such a relief. It is moments like this when I believe in a God who looks out for me.

  With Simon starting kindergarten, there was time for Jonathan to have me all to himself for the next eighteen months. We enjoyed many happy times together, laughing. He loved to jump up and down in his cot so energetically that I feared he might fly right out. He would also sit under the kitchen table banging pots and pans with a wooden spoon, and then would toddle out, grinning gleefully and proudly showing me the tools he had used to make all that noise. I would be preparing meals or tidying up, as the sun streamed through the wide kitchen window, and would join in my joyous little Jonathan’s laughter.

  I rapidly learned about child development as I watched our little sons pointing to animals, people and objects in picture books, naming them correctly and showing understanding of relationships. As they grew, I came to appreciate more fully their qualities as individuals. Simon was a beautifully-spoken well-behaved boy, not a particularly good sportsman, though he did excel in sailing his little Manly Junior at Woollahra Sailing Club. He was a peace-loving child. At age five he declared: I do not believe in violence. However, during one of the many mothers-and-young-children afternoon get-togethers at our home, a slightly older boy called Jamie kept taunting and shoving six-year-old Simon. Suddenly Simon lost his temper. Screaming with rage he ran after Jamie, who escaped and locked himself in his mother’s car. With a force and fury I had never seen in him, Simon hammered with his fists on the car door. My heart bled to see him so distressed, but I recognised that this was a boy who would set limits.

  A striking quality of Jonathan’s was an inordinate amount of physical courage. One summer when he was twelve, for days on end we heard a low-pitched, moaning sound which appeared to be coming from beneath his room. It was hard to identify. Was it a wounded bird? Was it something scraping against something else? Jonathan volunteered to crawl under the forty-centimetre-high space beneath the house and find out. The space was full of spiders and dirt and all sorts of scratchy plants and debris accumulated from the time it had been built some forty years before. He needed to move on his belly diagonally from the manhole at the north-western part of the house to the south-eastern and back again, in fairly dim light. He was gone for what seemed a long time, while we waited anxiously, blaming ourselves for letting him go under the house rather than getting a tradesman to do the job. But he crawled back, pulled himself upright and showed us that his mission had been a success. In his hand he held a tiny wounded kitten. We cared for it for a short time, but it died.

  Our little boys alternated between playing together happily and fighting. Partly this was due to Simon, a great builder of blocks, and later of Lego pieces and Meccano sets, becoming really mad when his little brother, in his clumsy attempts to participate, unwittingly destroyed some great construction. I say unwittingly because Jonathan simply did not have any malice in his character. Once Simon threw a chair at him, breaking a tooth in half so that Jonathan had to have it pulled out under anaesthetic. He had a bad reaction afterwards, thrashing about in a state of arousal. We had to restrain him and put him in a cushioned cot so he would not hurt himself.

  This happened on the day of my graduation as a Bachelor of Arts from Sydney University. We left Jonathan with a babysitter and rushed to get to the ceremony on time. All through the grand occasion in the majestic Great Hall of the University, the congratulations and photos, I had a vision of my little Jonathan in that terrible semi-conscious state in his cot at home.

  In autumn we liked to go to Cooper Park, an ideal area for adventurous children to explore, with its caves and swings and leafy paths, brooks full of tadpoles and frogs, and logs for climbing. Richard and I loved seeing the two boys run ahead, Simon nearly always dressed in browns and olive green to match his hazel eyes and brown hair and Jonathan in red and navy to match his blue-green eyes and fairer hair. They were so good-looking. Spring and early summer weekends were spent picnicking in Centennial Park, often with other friends, while the children, mostly little boys, fed ducks, chased birds and resisted our efforts to stop them falling into the lake.

  On weekdays, after picking up the children from kindergarten or infants’ school, a group of young mothers would meet to gossip at one of our special places like the Harbourside Lyne Park with its excellent playground equipment. We talked mainly of our children, their triumphs and our concerns, while keeping a watchful eye on what our offspring were doing. While we chatted and intervened to settle disputes such as he pushed me, brushed down dirt, attended to scratches, kissed sore knees better and just gave the occasional cuddle, the children climbed trestles, slid down slippery-dips increasingly faster and swung higher and higher on swings. They also talked with one another – or at least at one another.
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  Richard and I seemed to spend hours, weekend after weekend, holding on to the back of a bike and running along as the boys learned to peddle fast enough to gain balance. Both became proficient bike riders and enjoyed finding out about our neighbourhood, especially streets with no barking dogs, of which they were wary, just like their mother.

  Growing up in a city like Sydney and living close to some glorious Harbourside places – Camp Cove, Watsons Bay and Nielsen Park, as well as Bondi Beach – much of our outdoor summer time was spent at the beach. From the time they were toddlers, the boys were encouraged to enjoy water splashing over them, jumping over waves and eventually surfing. Learning to swim was imperative. When I took six-year-old Jonathan for lessons from an experienced elderly teacher at Bondi Baths, a real ‘old-timer’, I was told after a few lessons: That boy has the courage of a lion – but he is poorly co-ordinated. Bring him back next year and he’ll get it. He did. Both boys also had lessons from the legendary Alf Vockler, an old Olympian who taught children in a firm authoritative manner at Watsons Bay Baths. Determined Simon would swim his laps either under Vockler’s strict gaze or unsupervised. Then my heart would beat fast, knowing that if he encountered trouble I, a poor swimmer, could not save him.

  At school, Simon was selected for the Opportunity C (gifted children) class at primary school in Woollahra. His teacher was brilliant in knowing how to foster each child’s talent, and Simon blossomed. Reserved ten-year-old Simon, with his fine diction, was selected to make a speech in celebration of Red Cross Day in front of 1000 people at the Town Hall. Though apprehensive beforehand, he performed with amazing poise and not a little courage. This did wonders for his confidence and gained the respect of his peers, not easy for a boy who was relatively short for his age at the time.

  Jonathan lost some of his good looks during his primary years when the secondary teeth started emerging and could not find sufficient space in his narrow jaw. They crowded in on one another, the front two teeth protruding noticeably, like a rabbit’s. At the age of seven it was found that he needed to wear strong spectacles. I cried for weeks seeing those beautiful eyes veiled by lenses.

  In his middle childhood he was a very thin, wiry, extremely active boy. He was certainly not a team player. In kindergarten his teachers described him as wild and non-conformist. In a class photo at Rose Bay Primary, when he was about eight years old, he stands out. Every child except Jonathan is looking straight at the camera. He was constantly in trouble at this school, for calling out in class and not giving other children a chance to answer.

  Jonathan was probably bored, since this behaviour ceased when he too entered Woollahra Public Opportunity C Class. He blossomed. The boys’ primary years were characterised by the demands of innumerable projects necessitating trips to the library, photocopying, scissors-and-paste work and lots and lots of discussion and parental help. We transported the children to and from sporting events, birthday parties and camps, which seemed to take forever. Though much time was still spent adjudicating arguments between the two of them, as they invariably blamed one another, we also had the pleasure of seeing them sit for hours co-operating in building complex structures from ever-more-sophisticated building sets, playing table tennis and, as they grew older, talking endlessly about cricket.

  Simon proved a natural at sailing. He seemed to possess the qualities, mysterious to me, which make a good skipper. They included understanding wind direction, water currents and sails – but there was more. The other boys respected his judgement and his decision-making ability. He was not a boy of many words, but they listened to what he said. I spent my Sundays, heart in mouth, sitting with other parents watching the boys race their Manly Juniors and observing how our young sailors managed dangerous situations.

  One memorable Sunday a sudden storm hit the Harbour and literally swept the tiny vessels into the surrounding bays or in the direction of bigger boats, which immediately helped in a rescue effort. As each little boat and its soaked crew were brought in, their names were announced through the loud-speaker. But there was no sign of Simon’s boat. I was dying inside, praying and gritting my teeth. Eventually the boat was located after Simon rang the club from a small bay. Simon had, in fact, come through with flying colours, having calmly steered his craft into a sheltered spot without sustaining any damage at all.

  I tried hard not to show that all this was too much for an anxious mother from a land-locked eastern European country. For me, safety was paramount and anything to do with deep water made me fearful. But I also felt exhilarated that my son, growing up in this peaceful tolerant country, was confident enough to put himself into situations which, to me, spelled danger and risk. To him they were just a challenge to be enjoyed.

  At Woollahra Public, Jonathan took off like a rocket. As he proclaimed one day: At Woollahra school, each lesson is of great interest and compared to my last school, this place is a palace.

  His teacher knew how to nurture my son’s talents. In the entries Jonathan wrote in his diary, there is the sense of a boy bursting out of his skin in excitement at the expanding horizons of his intellectual and social world, and enjoying his successes.

  When he was seven, Jonathan had joined Mrs Shipp’s art school at Watsons Bay. There he painted and drew and made a type of lithograph, showing an intuitive understanding of colour, composition and perspective. During a visit to the school by acclaimed painter Desiderius Orban, his work was singled out for praise. I still have in my study a water-colour wash picture of a yellow house with two red-framed windows and a blue-framed door, set among trees and bushes and bathed in the rays of a prominent sun. That early work of Jonathan’s is a simple little painting, suggesting peace and warmth and love of nature.

  Jonathan and I developed a special relationship, based on the fact that he was my ‘baby’ and on the similarity of our temperaments and academic mindsets. I also felt a genetic connection. Having grown up not knowing anybody who looked like me, I saw in him, this fair-haired, green-eyed boy whose limbs had the same shape as mine, whose hair parted in the same way and who looked at me directly in the way shown in my cherished photograph of my father, a mix of myself and my father Szulem. Jonathan was my first experience of genetic mirroring.

  With two friends Jonathan entered the Bible Quiz run by the Jewish community, the venue being the vast and impressive Great Synagogue. The three boys decided that they were going to show ‘those kids’ at Jewish Day schools such as Moriah, who studied Jewish history and the Torah for years on a daily basis, what boys from a non-denominational school could do. They went about it in a determined, highly focused way, driven by ambition and, I suspected, a sense of superiority. The three met over several weekends ‘swatting up’ the Bible, testing each other, discussing, predicting questions and planning strategy. And they did it! To everyone’s astonishment and quite a few people’s displeasure, Jonathan’s team, the only one from a non-Jewish school, won the Senior team Bible Quiz for 15-year-olds as well as the prize for best individual debaters.

  Both Simon’s and Jonathan’s reading of their Bar Mitzvah portion of the Torah at the magnificent Great Synagogue and subsequent celebrations aroused further strong emotions in me. They were evidence of the continuity of our family and our people. We celebrated Simon’s Bar Mitzvah with a big reception at a hotel near Bondi Beach, with both grandparents, Opapa and Nena Gita, beaming with pride. It was a true Simcha (joyous occasion), at which we were showered with wishes of Mazal Tov! (Good Luck).

  Two years after Simon, Jonathan sang his portion in his beautiful alto, to the delight of the whole congregation. It was a balmy summer evening and our friends gathered in the garden of our home for the reception. I made a rather emotional speech. I said that it had been my dream that our sons should grow up not just academically bright and professionally successful, but as men of integrity and goodness. These qualities, I said, were already evident in both of them. We drank a toast to Jonathan growing up to Chachma and Tovah – in Hebrew, wisdom and goodnes
s. We felt that he was following his brother’s example.

  In my mother Nena Gita’s eyes there was no one in the world quite like her grandsons, the princes, the noble ones; no one so clever, so good, so aristocratic, so worthy of admiration as they. She was extraordinarily generous, and devoted to them both. And they reciprocated in their devotion to her.

  VIII

  The Boys Grow Up

  The boys’ high school years seemed to go faster than their early ones. While Simon attended the selective Sydney High, the old school of many notable Australians, Jonathan won a scholarship to Sydney College, a school that takes pride in its classical studies as well as its excellent science department.

  Simon made some lifelong friendships at Sydney High. One of his friends, Tim, played the classical guitar and offered to teach the musically talented Jonathan to play the instrument. My son developed a passion for it. He learned quickly and many an evening was spent as he played and we listened in delight.

  Jonathan loved his time at Sydney College, excelling in his studies. Beyond schoolwork, it was gratifying to see this tall, lanky, socially rather shy boy making friends with others who had similar interests.

  We could feel Simon’s and Jonathan’s excitement at the vast horizons opening before them. One day in the early weeks of his attendance at Sydney High, Simon came home and asked: ‘Have you heard of Descartes?’ I asked him why. At recess Tim had said Like Descartes, I think therefore I am, but the bell rang and we had to go into class.

  There were so many things to excite them, to motivate them to learn more, to push the boundaries. Our home was a place where politics and underlying ideologies were discussed, argued and even fought over, usually at dinner around our large kitchen table. Woollahra Opportunity class had early on encouraged the boys’ interest in the wider world and an awareness of social policies and politics. Both Simon and Jonathan developed an abiding interest in this at a young age, not only talking but also getting involved in the political process.